The movie Groucho never made that face on panel three--it's the motherfuckin' Mask of Anarchy ! It's so brilliant that I used to have nightmares about it--and I probably will again tonight! No wonder the guy on panel five is plotting to kill him (yeah right, like that was ever gonna work!)

(and just as an aside--doesn't that ranting priest look a lot like Dave Sim? So much of the author's irreverence reads like self-parody avant la lettre... and of course it just reinforces what we already knew--all parody is a veiled form of worship)

That's all I've got right now... There's a lot of plot in these issues, of course--but it's all in the service of establishing another larger than life personality upon the widening stage of Cerebus. Like Sophia, Elrod, and the Roach, Julius earns the author's protection (a kind of diplomatic immunity) through the sheer rightness of his migration from the pop cultural realm into Dave Sim's private theatre of the absurd--and he seems to exist primarily to humiliate/vex the protagonist. Unlike the earlier figures, he appears to be smarter than Cerebus, and he poses a different kind of a threat... The figures that the Earth-Pig respects are always more dangerous to him than the fools that trip him up... He can deal with the occasional pratfall, but not with being led down the garden path--which is unfortunate, 'cause he's got a serious streak of gullibility...

oh--and, lest we forget where the heart of this series lies--issue #16 closes with this cinematic gem of the don't- meet-cute/he's-got-amnesia-anyway school! (it's worthy of Random Harvest--and let me tell ya, that is worthy indeed! Really--no comic book artist has ever offered so much to a lover of classic Hollywood--not even Eisner!):